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We went from being 95% farmers to 2% farmers. Meeting our physical needs used to be hard. Now it's easy. Just because it's easy doesn't mean we don't fuck it u
by jjoonathan 4y ago
We went from being 95% farmers to 2% farmers. Meeting our physical needs used to be hard. Now it's easy.
Just because it's easy doesn't mean we don't fuck it up, because of course we do. We push everyone as hard as we can, sending the benefits up the social pyramid and the problems down the social pyramid. When the system experiences a shock, it gets sent down the social pyramid and crunches the people at the bottom.
We could do better, but we choose not to. This is what post-scarcity looks like in a world that hasn't figured out how to share. The core problem is: the more someone has the ability to change the system, the more incentives they have to not change the system.
- towaway15463 4y agoYou forget that those 2% of farmers are now supported by the entire bulk of an industrial economy. The work hasn’t disappeared, it’s just moved to other sectors like tractor and fertilizer production, genetic research, the petroleum industry, shipping networks, refrigeration and all the other things that make it possible to produce so much food with a small number of farmers. Until we automate all of that we’re no where near post scarcity.
- jjoonathan 4y agoIf you added up the "roots" of that 2%, it would multiply by a small factor. Wooo. Big deal. Same conclusion: we're not just post scarcity, we're distantly post-scarcity.
- banannaise 4y agoMost of which could be straightforwardly marshaled to handle food logistics, thus solving this problem, except that there are other priorities that are apparently more important. (Those priorities are not, in fact, more important.)